Brogan's Bar

Dame Street, Dublin 2

There are many times in one's life when one questions the very foundations on which one has built one's life: the beliefs one espouses, the values one holds, yes, even the beer one drinks. From the lip-trembling "I hate you all!" tantrums of early adolescence to the last-resort sad-bastard flash of the mid-life crisis, these are the volcanic upheavals of the human organism to purge the horrid and intolerable from one's life, to recast the world, as it were, in new and terrible geometries.

And so too it is with the BeerAndLoathing crew. They too have their crises of confidence. They too are human after all, misshapen and feral though their countenances appear. So it is that we find them in a local pub far from the teeming shebeens of the City Centre, when winter has curled about them like an old dark blanket and the air is savoury with turf smoke and good conversation, when fine beers have quenched the righteous fire of their hearts to an indifferent smoulder, so it is that the three turn now-mellowed eyes towards the Notebook of Hate which contains the outline for their next review. Glancing at the savage scribblings, the brutal character assassinations, the unrelenting ennumerations of fault and failure, they wonder through their benevolent haze at the force of the emotions they felt. Surely, muse they, it can't have been that bad. Surely we were being deliberately contrary, finding fault with anything and everything. Perhaps this old BeerAndLoathing thing is nothing more than good old-fashioned Irish begrudgery updated for the Information Age. Perhaps...

And then we go to a place like Brogan's and the whole thing is put horribly back into perspective. This is no mere begrudgery, this is not the emasculated nitpickery of the trainspotter. This is a holy mission, by Crom! How difficult can it be to run a good, no, an average pub? We're an easy people to please in this department, we Irish, perhaps too easy. Hell, if you set up a horse trough full of stale lager, arranged a few stools around it, and called it some stupid name like "Festy O'Giblet's", you'd pack the place out on a Saturday night in Dublin. The owners of pubs like Brogan's understand this and take unbelievable advantage of their clientele, providing the bare minimum of service while raking the loot in hand over fist. These pirates need a visit from the Revenue, followed on short order by the Health Board and the Fire Brigade, and maybe a priest too for good measure; you can't be sure what malign power these ruffians might have sold their souls to, so an exorcism is a sensible precaution.

First, there was the puke. When you go out in Dublin over the weekend, puke becomes your friend, your constant companion. You learn to admire its nuances, the complex interplay of bile and beer and half-digested fast food against cold concrete and stone. Puke-watching is an outdoor sport, however, and usually confined to the early hours of the morning. You do not expect to find it inside a pub at 8:30pm on a Saturday. Yet there it was, hidden in the corner of Brogan's lower bar that we claimed for the night. Old and crusty, like it'd been there for a while. This is inexcusable; punters don't pay £2.50 per pint of Guinness for the privilege of sitting in a previous occupant's stomach contents. Well, obviously they do, which is why Brogan's hasn't exactly made it a priority to clean it up.

And why should they? Business was booming. The upper bar was jammed solid by the time we arrived, so we were forced to pitch camp in the dismal cellar of the lower bar. And within half an hour of our arrival there, the place had come to a standstill.

Now, here's a problem for our canny landlord. His pub is now jammed stupid. Brilliant! The loot will really come rolling in now, thinks he. But people are obviously going to linger over their beers rather than face the five chaotic minutes of shoving and pushing and elbows in the kidneys it will take to get to the bar, place their order, and return to their table. The dirty ingrates! In the midst of this bedlam, the punters are nonetheless having fun! They're laughing, joking, flirting-- all the things, in other words, that Guinness ads and Bórd Fáilte brochures claim you can do in a Dublin pub-- despite the crush. There's only one thing for it: crank up the music.

That music is played in Dublin pubs at all is something of a mystery for me. After all, they sell these places abroad as hotbeds of convivial conversation, Ireland's answer to Parisian café culture. The type of music played is also puzzling. I mean, not that many young adults like Britney Spears surely (and those that do should probably be electronically tagged or made sign on weekly at their local Garda station or something), especially not when it's delivered at such volume that it feels like the top teenage trailer-trash temptress herself is plunging red-hot knitting needles into your eardrums. The only conclusion to be drawn here is that the music is not being played to entertain-- quite the opposite in fact. For if you're rendered incapable of communicating with the person sitting next to you, you'll do something, anything else-- like drink more. Ever see that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where these levitating ghoulies called The Gentlemen come to Sunnyvale and steal everyones' voices? That's how I feel drinking in a Dublin pub these days. Four hours of this shit and I want to put a stake through a publican's heart.

By now we've had a few beers and have shouted ourselves hoarse over Therapy? and The Pixies (admittedly, an improvement over Britney Spears) being played at 11 in a space not much larger than a suburban living room. Now a new excursion is needed: to the toilets to relieve our aching bladders. I have some sympathy for publicans in trying to keep their lavatory facilities up to scratch because there seems to be a subspecies of the Irish race born with crop sprayers where their evacuatory organs should be and even the cleanest jacks in town is usually an open sewer by midnight. But Brogan's take the biscuit for poor toilets-- no, let me rephrase that. Brogan's have taken the whole biscuit tin, rifled through it, stolen all the chocolate ones, and left us with the digestives. The lower bar's toilets are located under the stairs and are a breach of the Geneva convention or something. The floor was swimming in urine from the get-go. There were gaping holes in the ceiling where light fittings had been removed. There was an exposed wire behind a stove-in panel in the toilet cubicle. There was a wash basin but no hand-dryer or towels. What kind of death-cell is this? The toilets in the upper bar are no better where the reek of ammonia bleaches your hair and melts the contact lenses off your eyes as you walk in the door. This is a pub located on one of Dublin's main streets. I heard plenty of foreign accents in the pub the night we were there. What must these people think? I know what I think, but to express my loathing fully would probably involve the exchange of solicitors' letters.

Granted, the pint of Guinness served in Brogan's is a good one, but it's cold comfort when you are exposed to this kind of squalor and indifferent greed. The pub's décor is executed in the now-standard traditional-pub-by-numbers style with old advertisements stuck to the tobacco coloured walls... too much has already been said on this subject elsewhere to warrant a reprise here. I cannot urge you enough, good reader, to stay clear of this place.